Stereo or three-dimensional (3D) video has attracted increasing interests in recent years. There is a trend that a large portion of the stereo videos will be captured and consumed by portable multifunction devices such as mobile devices. For example, several virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs), together with the maturing civilian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and robots, are capable of providing very exciting immersive first person view (FPV) experiences, either for personal enjoyment or for visual inspection of otherwise inaccessible terrain features. In these fascinating applications, the low-delay transmission of stereo videos over varying wireless channel presents a huge challenge.
As known, a stereo image/video is composed of frames from two views. The data volume is almost doubled in comparison with the traditional two-dimensional (2D) image/video. As a result, the coding efficiency is of vital importance to stereo video transmission under the constraint of limited bandwidth. Meanwhile, wireless channel is time-varying and the rate of variation is dependent on the velocity of the device that captures the stereo video. For example, for the capturing device is in high mobility, it is preferred to choose a robust modulation scheme and a strong channel code in order to ensure reliable video delivery. This reduces the effective bandwidth and exacerbates the discrepancy between source and transmission rates. As a result, the video quality is sacrificed and the user experience is dramatically degraded.